Plagues Against Empire

The plagues are against us, because we unleashed them.

In Revelation 16, John of Patmos’s visions cycle back to another series of seven. This time, instead of seven seals (read more here or here), or seven trumpets (read more here), John sees angels pouring out seven bowls of divine wrath.

The weirdness and scariness always turned me off from this section of Revelation. Angels pouring out bowls of punishing wrath—what? But when I began to view John’s book as a mystical vision expressed through a horror/sci-fi genre mashup, my fear melted and my curiosity piqued. I haven’t been able to stop reading the book since—and it’s also permitted me to come to terms with my enjoyment of all things culturally apocalyptic, whether flesh-chomping zombies or alternative societies battling to stay human after nuclear fallout.

In these times when reality seems to mirror our worst apocalyptic fears, I find it therapeutic to spend time with the book of Revelation. I can’t quite explain it, but that’s why I’m writing about it more these days. I’m not trying to find false end-times expectations stirred through, say, the horror of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. (Christian Zionists believe that cataclysmic war in the Middle East will be followed by Christ’s return). Instead, I’m discovering ancient symbols and visions themselves disturbing enough to hold reality’s doom.

There’s a politically subversive message at the heart of John’s horror. The seven bowls of wrath, when poured out, initiate seven plagues. Another key part of the Bible that features plagues is the book of Exodus and the story of God leading Moses and the ancient Israelites out of slavery from the Egyptian Empire. In that story, Moses and the priest Aaron herald divine plagues against the Egyptian dictator and the oppressors. The plagues begin the Empire’s fall. If contemporary prophet Cornel West is right, “we’re witnessing the collapse and implosion of the American Empire” right now. It’s a fair question, then, to ask how plagues of destruction are manifesting today.

John is steeped in the Hebrew Bible and has God’s anti-imperial plagues in mind when describing his visions. Right before chronicling angels pouring out bowls of wrath, he reports that the heavenly angels “sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” (Revelation 15:3). He’s teeing up the plagues with a redemption song.

The plagues brought on by the bowls of wrath are intense: sores, seas and rivers turning to blood, scorching sun, pitch-black darkness, a dried river Euphrates, frogs, and a violent earthquake. In John’s context of Roman imperialism, the Exodus echoes become attacks against the Roman Empire. Except if we reject a God who wields brutal violence, which I believe we must to retain our humanity, then the plagues are not God’s punishment of humanity, but a symbolic description of the violence that the Empire inflicts.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Let me linger on this point for a moment. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about God’s anger, and it’s important to recognize that the God depicted in Revelation does inflict catastrophic violence and destruction on enemies out of wrath. As much as divine rage in the Bible might have something to teach us about acknowledging our anger against injustice, I believe that Revelation’s divine vengeance needs to be rejected and seen for what it is, unveiled: the horrors of our violence against each other.

I’m writing this post having followed Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s Instagram account, where he posts pictures sent from friends and family still in Palestine of the ongoing onslaught and destruction. I don’t necessarily recommend following his account, because how can one recommend apocalyptic posts that shake us with reality? But this week’s posts had me trembling in sadness, shocked in my privilege, and interrupted in my comfort. Or, consider the “big, ugly bill” that recently passed in the United States Congress. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 7.6 million people will lose Medicaid coverage due to the rapacious cruelty of transferring even more money from the poorest of us to the wealthiest of us.

We don’t need to look to God to turn waters bloody or to have the sun scorch us. That’s what the Empire does. That’s what we do.